Humanity and Nature Studies

This major mixes the liberal arts with the environmental crunchiness that so many students want. With humanity and nature studies, you can craft your major from a menu of courses—from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to create a major that matches your interests.

Your studies combine the cultural with the natural to shape well-rounded individuals ready to engage in issues like global climate change. During your four years, you will develop a sophisticated understanding of how humans continue to conceive, construct, and fulfill their relationships to the natural world.

Upon completion, you will be prepared for graduate or professional studies in fields such as environmental law and environmental humanities, the Peace Corps, or for a variety of environmentally focused careers in business, education (“green teaching” before and afterschool programs), government, industry, advertising, public policy, community planning, nature therapy, or the non-profit sector.

Students majoring in humanity and nature studies can choose from three emphases: global cultural perspectives, leadership and a new future, or reviving a natural history.

Profile

I love that Northland College is a small school where you know your students by their names and where you can do your job the way you think it should be done: in depth, giving 100%, expecting the same in return, and reaping the rewards as you see real progress in the students' growth and development -- "Cameo work" is what I call it! At Northland, students receive a lot of personal attention from many very warm and caring people. In addition, our environmental liberal arts mission has made us unique in the nation, so they are exposed to an incredibly wide variety of areas for such a small institution. This is also a place where any student can become involved in all kinds of things: from tracking wolves in the north woods to being on a college-wide search committee and having a vote that counts. Students have a lot of "say" here: they can make real change and it shows. Away from Northland College, I travel. I have been raised all over the planet and the nomadic lifestyle is a part and parcel of who I am.

As a professional, I am a French native, professor of English, specialized in the medieval period (particularly Chaucer which felicitously blends my two cultures) and also linguistics. I also teach "Spanish for Proficiency and Fluency": a service program I have developed at Northland College. To find more information on Spanish, go to www.northland.edu/spanish.

Research

Since I am completely trilingual and have travelled around the world, you can understand my profound interest in other cultures. Over the years, I have developed and taught two courses: Contemporary Third World Literature (Eng 217) which includes men and women authors, and the spring seminar, Women of the Third World (Eng 233), which is a focus on women writers and women's issues in the developing nations of the world. Convinced that I am that cultural myopia is becoming more and more dangerous to everybody's health, I have just offered a new course on the "Literature of the Arab World". So, the essence of my life is the constant reading and reviewing of books -- and I love to read! On the side of my couch, at home, there are three piles of books -- in English, in French and in Spanish -- that never go down. As some books are read and put away, others take their place: books for research, award-winning novels from my French relatives, or wonderful stuff that I have picked up in Latin America. Beyond the study of other cultures through literature, I have another very strong area of focus: this one related to the environment. In fact, for the last four years, I have been the holder of the A.D Mary Elizabeth Andersen Hulings Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. This has been a wonderful opportunity, with release time for research, to focus on all my "projects" and especially -- since we are an Environmental Liberal Arts College -- to do "green literature" but through the particular lenses of other cultures. I am in the process of creating a new upper-level course on the theme of "The Environmental Literature of Other Cultures in the Americas-Latin America and the Caribbean" and am developing an anthology for the course. My last two Hulings Public Lectures (February 18, 2010 and February 10, 2011) were entitled: "Other Visions, Other Voices: Nature and the Dark Side of Machismo in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories" and " The Metaphoric Use of Nature for Biting Satire in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories"